On AJR

Emanuel: “As the title of this project suggests, Revelation “roasts” Rome—both humorously and via imagined incendiary flame (see Rev. 17:16; 18:8)—to the extent of creating a new world order in which the implied Jewish Other reigns supreme over and against the Roman imperial order. Rather than wallow in the repeated diminishment of a Jewish marginal self, the text combats Rome and Roman sympathizers via parodic and venomous depictions of them. In short, the text creates a comic counterworld—one in which Rome is fool and its implied Jewish counterparts thrive (or so they hope) under God’s new Empire.”

Book Note: Julia Watts Belser, Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Tong: “Nevertheless, what remains most impressive, in my mind, is Belser’s willingness to wrestle with the moral ambiguity presented by her texts. As she notes in her postlude, Bavli Gittin presents a God who cares deeply about the suffering of individual Jews, while at the same time attenuating the presence of society’s most vulnerable: ‘This is a history of unshed tears, of unheard cries: the wronged wife, the raped whore, the slave boys bound to Roman beds, the daughters drowning in the sea––all the silenced voices that linger like a haunting in the margins of these tales.’”

Twitter

Today is the Jewish festival of Succot. Part of the tradition includes eating meals outside in temporary huts. Some people enjoy this, some, like the girl in this image from 14th C Add MS 26968 (& Miri), do not #HebrewProject#succotpic.twitter.com/BcaXxwwwMz